Wherever you choose to celebrate and commemorate the 29th annual King Holiday Observance, it will be hard to outdo the plans at the King Center in Atlanta that began on January 4 and will culminate on January 15, the day of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s birth.
During President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., it was noted that King was among a coterie of prominent Americans who had stood in the pulpit, including Booker T. Washington.
In 1962, when King spoke there, the waters of the nation were troubled by the Civil Rights Movement. When Biden was there on Monday, he too wanted to rouse the congregation and visitors about the importance of democracy and the need to uphold its promise.
Attempts to find King’s speech on that occasion have not been successful, but we can speculate that it resonated with the same frequency as the one he delivered in the summer, at the National Press Club in the nation’s capital. His theme that day was nonviolent resistance and his hope for the future of race relations in America.
“Just last week,” he said, after delivering introductory remarks and explaining a welter of current problems, “I was convicted in the city of Albany, Georgia, for participating in a peaceful march protesting the segregation conditions of the community. I decided, on the basis of conscience, not to pay the fine of $178, but to serve the jail sentence of 45 days. Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and I were notified that some unknown donor had paid our fines and that we had to leave the jail. As the Atlanta Constitution suggested the other day, we have reached a new landmark in race relations. We have witnessed persons being ejected from lunch counters during the sit-ins, and thrown into jail during the freedom rides. But for the first time, we witnessed people being kicked out of jail.”
There is no record of the crowd’s response to that irony or his invocation of Victor Hugo that “…there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Central to King’s address was the powerful ingredient of nonviolent resistance to bring down the walls of segregation and put an end to white supremacy. “It is my great hope that as the Negro plunges deeper in the quest for freedom, he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of nonviolence,” King continued. “We must never succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, for if this happens, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
Some would contend that with or without violence, “a long and desolate night of bitterness” to end the relentless racism and white supremacy prevails, with no end in sight.
But there is no mistaking that some incremental changes occurred from the nonviolent marches and protests against segregation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Act of 1968.
This was Dr. King’s outlook in the early 1960s and, by the end of the decade, his ideas were undergoing a dramatic change, particularly as he addressed the ongoing war in Vietnam.
The radical King still maintained his nonviolent strategy and another potent element of outlook was taking shape in 1962: the full realization of the American dream, a word that within a year or so would be at the fore of his driving narrative.
At the close of his speech at the National Press Club, you can hear intimations of his most famous speech. “When it is realized,” he said of his dream, “the jangling discords of our nation will be transformed into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood and men everywhere will know that America is truly the land of the free and the home of the brave.” (See A Testament of Hope—The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins, 1986; edited by James M. Washington.)